Patients with certain medical conditions, diseases and/or chronic disorders are often required to make regular visits to a doctor. During such visits, the patient is typically required to recall and describe any problems, symptoms or ailments that occurred since the last visit. In response to the patient's input, the doctor keeps track of the patient's progress and often prescribes medication or some other form of treatment. Many patents, however, have difficulty accurately recounting this information to the doctor. Often patients and caretakers forget about the time and occurrence of a particular pain or ailment, or the patient is unable to communicate the information to the doctor because of a medical condition. A doctor may therefore fail to recognize a medical problem or misdiagnose and treat a different medical condition.
Medical logs have been used by patients and caretakers to help keep track and record a variety of health related incidences of a patient. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,307,263 and 5,691,932 both disclose hand-held microprocessor-based health monitoring systems. With both of these devices, the patient or healthcare provider is required to manipulate a number of keys or switches to enter information and to cause a variety of symbols and icons to appear on a display. These devices, as a consequence, are not intuitive to use. As a result, certain patients such as the elderly, children, persons with little or no computer-related skills, or those too sick or incapacitated to learn may have difficulty using these devices.
Accordingly, an electronic, hand-held, easy-to-use, icon driven medical log that can be used by the elderly, children, the sick, the incapacitated, and those with minimal computer skills is needed.